Eero Volotinen wrote:

2011/6/2 Todd Cary todd@aristesoftware.com:

...

My Admin books are out of date, so I need a new one that contains info about the Linux as in Centos 5.5.

I am a "Sunday user"; not one earning a living as an Admin. Recommendations welcomed....

how about:

The Definitive Guide to CentOS (Books for Professionals by Professionals) from amazon

<snip> Then there's the Real Thing: I'd rate these evenly, though some folks think more of the second: Essential Systems Administration, Ealeen Frisch, O'Reilly. You should especially read the second chapter, The Unix Way, which explains, clearly, the archetecture of *Nix, and how it works and hangs together (not the code, but the o/s) (There's also an O'Reilly Linux Systems Administration title)

The other is the "red" or "purple" (forget which is most current) book: Unix System Administration Handbook, Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, Hein

I will note that every *Nix person I know, and many Windows folks, have a *lot* of books published by O'Reilly - he's the only publisher who goes above and beyond to find authors who not only *really*, deeply know the subject, BUT CAN ALSO COMMUNICATE IT CLEARLY. You can *read* O'Reilly books, as opposed to the usual textbook (*bleah*).

mark, who gets no kickback for advertising O'Reilly

On 6/2/2011 2:28 PM, Eero Volotinen wrote:

...

...

...

My Admin books are out of date, so I need a new one that contains info about the Linux as in Centos 5.5.

I am a "Sunday user"; not one earning a living as an Admin. Recommendations welcomed....

how about:

The Definitive Guide to CentOS (Books for Professionals by Professionals) from amazon

<snip> Then there's the Real Thing: I'd rate these evenly, though some folks think more of the second: Essential Systems Administration, Ealeen Frisch, O'Reilly. You should especially read the second chapter, The Unix Way, which explains, clearly, the archetecture of *Nix, and how it works and hangs together (not the code, but the o/s) (There's also an O'Reilly Linux Systems Administration title)

for basic or advanced use: the rute:

http://linux.2038bug.com/rute-home.html

The things I always look for and almost never find are

(a) A split between tutorial (step-by-step for common uses) and reference sections (that have all the options). Once you've followed the tutorial you won't want to wade through that again to find the option to make an obscure change.

(b) Explanations of the OS/shell/window manager/ concepts involved and how much of what you are learning applies in general and how much are specific to this distribution/version/program. For example, a lot of what happens on a command line is done by the shell and will be the same for everything you type under that shell (wildcard expansion, i/o redirection, etc.). Likewise a lot of what you do in a GUI will be window operations that work the same way no matter what is running in the window. A lot of things are common among all unix-like systems and when you learn new things it would be nice to know which ones are only specific to certain situations.

2011/6/3 Mike Hanby mhanby@uab.edu:

I've found this one helpful: RHCE Red Hat Certified Engineer Linux Study Guide (Exam RH302) (Certification Press)

it's a bit antique. newer version (rhcsa & rhce ) is coming soon to stores.

-- eero

On 6/3/2011 11:54 AM, Thomas Harold wrote:

...

The things I always look for and almost never find are

(a) A split between tutorial (step-by-step for common uses) and reference sections (that have all the options). Once you've followed the tutorial you won't want to wade through that again to find the option to make an obscure change.

For pure reference, I've always liked my "Linux in a Nutshell" book (O'Reilly publisher), which has a huge section with all of the commands and options. It even has sections on "vi" and "emacs".

Google and man pages take care of the rest.

(Also, since CentOS is so similar to RHEL, anything taught in a RHEL book tends to carry over.)

Back in the old (pre-X) days of unix, the entire manual set was a few small books that you could easily flip through and understand how all of the tools might be used together under control of a shell command or script. And if you understood what the fork() system call did, all the rest would make sense. I'm not sure how someone starting today would find the core tool set (which is almost unchanged today except for the GNU options on some commands and the addition of perl) or where to start with man/google. Or if these even matter any more now that there are monolithic GUIs to do most common operations and computers are fast enough to run them.

On 6/3/2011 12:32 PM, Paul Heinlein wrote:

On Fri, 3 Jun 2011, Les Mikesell wrote:

...

I'm not sure how someone starting today would find the core tool set (which is almost unchanged today except for the GNU options on some commands and the addition of perl) or where to start with man/google. Or if these even matter any more now that there are monolithic GUIs to do most common operations and computers are fast enough to run them.

A low barrier to entry is great for development and testing but horrible for production.

A GUI or other framework that can assist getting a service up and running quickly is a great help; the developer or admin and his customer(s) can quickly understand its applicability to the task at hand.

Moving that service into production, however, requires a different understanding: risk assessment, scalability, configuration boundaries, etc. The rapid-development tool rarely provides such insight, with predicatable consequences in production.

That's true if you are inventing a new service or deploying it in a way that the program/GUI designer didn't anticipate. Everyone had to do a lot of that in the old days when there weren't standard approaches and hardware was so expensive you would do some odd things to work around its limitations. But these days it is pretty rare to do something new in a production environment, even more so in internal infrastructure, and the person doing it probably won't be looking for a beginner sysadmin book. I'm leaning more towards running things that come with good defaults and fill-in-the-form choices as much as possible these days. What are the odds that a new sysadmin will build something for a typical office that is easier to maintain than, say, ClearOS, with it's 'just add users' setup and web form administration that you can have working without ever wading though the man pages for bash, perl, or sort'?